nu.kanga.list.mud-dev

13529: Re: [MUD-Dev] Justifying twinking

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>From: "John Bertoglio" <jb@pulsepoll.com>

>Rats the size of full grown possums would scare anyone. 

Rats the size of full-grown possums would be nearly indistinguishable from
possums.  ;)  Marsupial or no, opossums are nasty creatures.

>The key is in how the fiction is developed. If you present the players
>with challenges which are described as being trivial and they are killed
>they feel stupid. Scale the description of the rats to match the 
>perception of the Newbie. The Newbie will understand later when the 
>rats he perceived as the size of dogs are, in fact, fully squashable 
>by a small human foot. A sliding scale of perception would also 
>provide an ample in game reasons for lowering experience granted to high
>level PCs by killing vermin.

ObSignalToJustifySnarkyPossumComment:

I suspect, based on comments by some of our testers, that players may object
to rats simply because they're cliched.  "Are you going to have rats to
start out with like every other game in existence?" was, I believe, more or
less an exact quote.

Of course, we WILL have rats, but they'll probably flee from player
characters unless the rats are amassed in large numbers.  The rats will
primarily be wolf-fodder.

Now, killer squirrels, on the other hand... that's just plain undignified. 
Unless they're carrying bubonic plague, of course.

   -- Sharon



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